When Conor Healy was a freshman at Harvard, he applied to take a freshman seminar class on free speech. Originally from Toronto, Healy chose the class because free speech seemed to be a popular topic in the United States when he arrived.

“I took it because I thought I could learn a lot — and I did,” Healy told USA TODAY College.

The students in the course learned about a number of issues: the First Amendment, Holocaust denialism, whether hate speech should be banned, and more.

During the class, Healy met another student, Francisco Trujillo. Inspired by their free speech class and conversations with their peers about politics, they created Harvard’s first club dedicated to free speech: The Open Campus Initiative.

“We decided to seek out some method for advocating for the things that we learned and we realized that there was no group at Harvard interested in open dialogue,” Healy said.

Together — Healy is president, Trujillo is vice president — they now run the club, which held their first meeting in January and now boasts 35 general members and 6 board seats. “Word spread very quickly,” Healy said.

In addition to holding weekly meetings to discuss free speech, the group also invites controversial speakers to campus, like Jordan B. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Peterson is well-known for his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns.